


yet I should kill thee with much cherishing

by firstaudrina



Category: Euphoria (TV 2019)
Genre: F/F, Rehab, Sapphic September, Teen Angst, Train Station
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26755039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: There’s a scientific thing about memories. How the good ones don’t stick around as easy.
Relationships: Rue Bennett/Jules Vaughn
Comments: 10
Kudos: 48





	yet I should kill thee with much cherishing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doumekiss (Odd_Ellie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odd_Ellie/gifts).



> Takes place after S1.

Rue was a goner at first blood.

But later she thinks — was it circumstance? Could anyone have ridden home on Jules’ bike if they asked and tiptoed barefoot through her door and dabbed at the bloody slash on her arm until it was clean? Could anyone have kissed her? At winter formal, Jules asked why Rue never _really_ kissed her but now Rue wants to know why Jules never really kissed first. She always kissed _back_. Would it have been enough to slide into her DMs, to paint red shadow on the corners of her eyes and take her to the club? Was Jules in love with attention and Rue was just — her source, her supplier?

It’s ungenerous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rue struggles with that sometimes. She’s working on it. She’s been clean for fifteen days. 

On Halloween, Jules hadn’t even kissed back. She dodged Rue, dropped her hand. When the kiss came, it was underwater, forget-me-not drunk.

There’s a scientific thing about memories. How the good ones don’t stick around as easy.

_Are you mad at me?_ Rue had asked Jules repeatedly, _Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me?_ And now Jules almost definitely is, because she’s blocked Rue on socials and doesn’t answer texts, not that Rue can text right now. They keep her phone in a lockbox with everyone else’s. Rue is too chickenshit to call but sometimes she looks at Jules’ Finsta on Lexi’s account and drinks in her curated runaway life. That’s probably not why Lexi comes to visit. 

Jules looks —

Rue doesn’t really know how Jules looks. She never posts her whole face, just a close-up of a blue eye shadowed with neon green and iridescent stickers. A pair of hands twined together. Baby pink Doc Martens with sparkle laces. A bright orange manicure, already chipped. It feels like someone tore up Rue’s favorite picture and she’s here trying to Scotch-tape the pieces back together.

You can’t stake your sobriety on somebody else. Rue’s heard that a lot. She’s been sober twenty days. They wrote her off for the last few days of school before winter break and she spent Christmas in a forlorn rehab common room, with falling-apart decorations from fifteen years ago and a small tree in a pot that her mom brought and then had to take home with her. Gia is still mad. Rue doesn’t have to ask.

Sobriety is looking down a long empty tunnel and knowing a train just passed through it, a train you were supposed to be on. Rue can’t escape the sense that she is always missing something — her impulse control, her empathy, a piece of her brain that would make everything normal. She’s always playing catch-up and falling behind, which makes it easier to keep falling behind. 

There are twenty-five days from the end of winter semester to the start of spring and Rue has already blazed through them. Everyone except her — and Jules — is back in class by now. She knows there are hallways full of kids wearing puffed jackets against the January chill, most of them not thinking of her at all, but maybe some of them saying, _Yeah, rehab again_. When she comes back, she’ll be late, and they’ll all be looking at her, people who grew up watching her go off the rails, and maybe none of them remember Jules at all. It’s ironic, because Rue could never forget about Jules, and everyone was always telling her that Jules was going to forget her.

That really fucked her up. To have someone be your best and you’re just their best-for-right-now, until a better option comes along and they leave for the city on a train.

“What would you say to Jules right now?” the counselor asks. Rue says she doesn’t know, but later she thinks, _I already did that shit to my mom and I couldn’t do it again, but then I did it again anyway because that’s who I am, I guess. Would it have been better to run away with you or fall apart at home? Maybe I could have stayed sober with you. Maybe no one would have noticed when I faltered out there in the big wide world and it would have been worse. I got scared. I got so scared that you only wanted me as your ticket out of town, your most reliable ego boost. Maybe I’d get to watch you drop me for Anna in real time. I thought about my mom and my sister and I don’t know how you’re not thinking about your dad, because he was nice. Just don’t be mad at me, please, don’t be mad —_

She scrawls it on a piece of notebook paper and then tears it out, folds it up small and shoves it in a drawer. 

Everyone told Rue it was nothing and if that was true, she didn’t know why Jules was the only one who made her feel so much _something_. She knew all about nothing. She breathed it in every day. What she had with Jules wasn’t nothing.

“Maybe if this goes okay and I come back, then maybe I could talk to her dad and he’ll —” Rue fingers are all wrapped up in her sleeves, feet tapping, and Lexi has that nauseous look on her fact that she sometimes gets when they talk about Jules.

“Um, Rue.” She has to say it a few times to interrupt the flow of Rue talking. “Rue. She’s back. I was going to tell you. She’s back, she came back like a week after classes started. Apparently her dad is really angry and she’s grounded for, like, ever, but —”

The words fade out. The room fades out and Rue’s institutionally uncomfortable wooden chair with the worn-through padding drops through the floor, through the earth, right into its molten center. 

“What?” she says finally, even though she heard what Lexi said. 

Lexi presses her knees together, sits up very straight, and mumbles, “Yeah.”

“Can you —” Rue is up and out, into her room and the drawer, where she snatches the folded-up paper. She doesn’t read it over but she does open it up to add, _I love you I’m sorry_ , before bringing it back to Lexi. “Just give it to her for me. Okay? It’s okay if she doesn’t take it, but just — for me? Yeah?”

Lexi stares at the sad little bit of crumpled-up paper, which looks like actual garbage held between her manicured nails, dark red for winter. “Um. Okay.”

“Yeah?” Rue pressed. “You’ll do it? Lexi.”

“Yeah, yes, I’ll do it.” Lexi does put it in her pocket but then she just sits there with prim unease, hands in her lap. “Rue. You know you shouldn’t have gone with her, right? That would have been bad. That would have been a mistake.”

Rue half-nods and shrugs. “What difference does it make? I made a mistake anyway.”

Lexi doesn’t have anything to say to that.

Rue spends the next however pulling threads from the sleeves of her sweater, making neat piles of acrylic wool fluff like tiny birds’ nests and then dropping rolled-up paper scraps into them for eggs. She doesn’t know what she thinks is going to happen — a breathless call, a letter in the mail, or maybe just her phone buzzing away in that box with her never the wiser. 

She’s not supposed to have a visitor this week because Lexi came last time and her mom is working and Gia is surly with her, still betrayed. But while she’s sitting in the common doing her stupid worksheet from group with its questions about obsessive thoughts — Rue puts two dot-eyes and a downward frown into the _o_ of _obsessive_ — someone comes in to say, “Bennett. You got somebody.”

Rue has shivers all down her back and wrists. Hope is a thing with feathers, and all that freshman year lit stuff.

She sits up in one jangly motion and kind of smoothes herself all over, turns and sees Jules there with a baby backpack and the pink Doc Martens, which now have Sharpie all over them. Little cartoons, and maybe poems. A couple of gleaming stick-on rhinestones. Her hair is all dark now, except for some bleach-blonde bits in the front. “Hey,” Jules says.

Rue remembers their clasped hands, Jules on the train and her still in the station, both of them crying, going in two different directions. Maybe still going in two different directions.

“Hey,” Rue says.


End file.
